Syd Fox's lecture got us fired up and ready to play, and no novice game for us! We wanted to take on the big boys.
We entered something called a side game . The main pairs game was a two-session event that had started in the afternoon. The side game was only one session. It was mainly for those who had been knocked out of a KO in the afternoon, or for people like Toni and me, who had only just arrived.
We were in one of the large ballrooms on the lower level. There were several different events taking place in there. We used our real names and ACBL numbers. Our table assignment was KK-8, North-South. The two K s are not a typo. There were a lot more than twenty-six sections in the tournament, so they had to double up on letters. Somewhere else in the hotel, another pair was sitting North-South at table K-8 with only one K .
Two women sat in the East-West seats. West stared at me a moment, then said, "Alton, right?"
I was shocked.
She and her partner introduced themselves as Lydia and Renee.
I didn't introduce Toni to them. She'd be using three different names at the tournament, Toni, Annabel, and Teodora, and I didn't want to have to remember which people knew her by which name.
"We met Alton at a sectional," Lydia told Toni. "He was helping his blind uncle." She turned to me. "Is he here?"
I hesitated. "I think he's coming later," I said.
"He's an amazing player," said Lydia. "And I'd say that even if he wasn't blind."
"I didn't know you played too," said Renee.
"I'm just learning," I said.
"So am I," said Renee. "And I've been playing for twenty-five years."
"The time you quit learning is the time to quit playing," said Lydia.
Okay, I realize you didn't come all the way to Chicago to watch Toni and me play in a side game. That would be like a sports reporter who's supposed to be covering the Super Bowl going on and on about the pregame charity touch-football match between the players' wives. It was bad enough I made you sit through Syd Fox's lecture.
The thing of it is, Toni and I played great! We used a lot of the new bids I had learned, but it was more than just that. I no longer thought of bidding as a bunch of rules to be memorized. It was a conversation. I imagine it's like learning a foreign language. After a while you stop translating every word in your head and start thinking in that language. This was a language based on symbols and logic instead of words and phrases. Every bid Toni made, and even the bids she didn't make, like the dog that didn't bark, gave me information about her hand.
Syd Fox's lecture helped too. None of those exact card combinations came up, but he had gotten me thinking along the right lines, and I made all but one of my contracts. When the scores were posted with one round to go, Richards and Castaneda were in fifth place with a 53 percent game.
Toni was worried about our last round, however. "They bid that lucky slam against us," she griped. "I bet no one else bid it."
It turned out she was right. When the final results were posted we had fallen to 49 percent.
She complained all the way to the elevator, using language I usually hear from Cliff. "All because of that spade slam !" (Adjective deleted.) "It took two finesses ! (The same adjective deleted.) "A twenty-five percent slam! If you'd had the king of spades, or if I'd had the queen of clubs, instead of the other way around, we would have set it. Switch our hands and he would have been down two."
I looked at the hand record. "How could East jump to three spades on that garbage? He has nine points, and flat distribution."
"We were fixed," said Toni.
I laughed.
"What's so funny?" she demanded.
"Listen to us. We sound like everybody else."
She smiled. "Yeah, isn't it great?"
Do you know that thing about how nobody ever talks on elevators? Not true when it comes to bridge players. Mostly, they complained about their partners.
"We pushed them into an unmakeable contract," complained a short round man, "but my partner sacrifices at five hearts, because, she says, she had no defense. She had the ace and king of clubs!"
No doubt his partner was on another elevator complaining about him.